Do you find yourself wondering where the spark has gone in your relationship? Perhaps you and your partner started out having great, energetic, exciting sex but now find your sex life has suffered from the demands of everyday life. Many relationships experience difficulty when sex becomes routine, predictable, or infrequent. Sexual intimacy is one of the best ways to maintain not only a healthy marriage, but a happy one as well. A satisfying sex life is often the glue that holds a relationship together and can also make relationship challenges easier to handle. But what can you do to revitalize your sex life and add back the spice to the bedroom?

Let’s start by identifying some of the underlying causes of a dysfunctional sex life:

• Gender Differences: Men and women tend to differ in sexual frequency. Generally, while women are usually interested in sex and would like a better sexual relationship with their husbands, there are factors that can deter them from having sex as often as their husbands would like. Men and women also differ on the role sex plays in their relationship. Most often, men want to have sex to form a connection between themselves and their partners while women want to have already formed a connection before sexual activity.
• Lack of sex or sexual compatibility: A lack of sex in a relationship can indicate a problem in another area. In situations when there is no sex, challenges that arise can be much more difficult to deal with.
• Non-sex issues: The busy demands of everyday tasks can play a role in the drop-off in sexual satisfaction. Sometimes couples fall into a routine, place other things above caring for their sexual relationship, or sex simply falls lower and lower on the priority list without the couple realizing it.

Don’t forget about emotional intimacy. A healthy sexual relationship isn’t just about the physical closeness, but includes the emotional intimacy as well. While a spicy love life is entirely subjective, happy couples usually feel free to explore and enjoy their sex life through vitality, creativity, and intimacy both physically and emotionally.

What matters more, quality or quantity? What matters most is what you as a couple enjoy and find valuable. Not everyone is creative or curious in the bedroom. If this is you, you might value quantity and can add the spice back into the relationship by just having sex. For others, quality might be important. Explore together and figure out what’s right for you as a couple.

Don’t let a foggy haze get in the middle of your relationship, clear it up. Try clearing up some of the blockages between you and your partner. This could include attempting to understand what the other is getting caught up in or addressing some of the barriers in your relationship. By simply clearing some of the haze out of your love life you can find more empathy and compassion for one another, which can help to address the sexual relationship more directly.

Fresh it up a bit! This requires interest and intent on both parts of the couple. Once these are firm, you might find the freedom to try all kinds of different things in the bedroom to spice up your sex life. With a connection and emotional intimacy between partners can come the freedom to mix things up a bit. Try to discover what brings the most to your relationship, whether it by surprise, mystery, performance, or something exotic. It’s up to you to try something new specifically designed to excite and satisfy the other person.

Most importantly, nurture and care for your relationship. Try to cultivate your relationship both inside and outside of the bedroom. Enjoy one another, have some fun, and trust each other! Spicing up your sex life is not only a matter of sexuality but also a matter of treating the relationship as something to be cared for and something that grows and changes over time. You should continually look to find ways to bring energy and interest